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“We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones.” — Stephen King
I was born on Friday the 13th, and — so the family legend goes, anyway — my parents were all set to name me Jason until I came out that day.
They decided it would bring on some bad juju if they named me the same as the killer in the “Friday the 13th” movie franchise.
When I got old enough — well, still probably too young, but old enough — and my birthday fell on a Friday the 13th, my mom let me celebrate by inviting a couple friends over to spend the night and watch a marathon of scary movies.
I love horror movies and have since I was a kid.
I love all the great slasher franchises: “Friday the 13th,” “Halloween,” “Nightmare on Elm Street,” and lesser ones like “Hellraiser.” I love the great standalones like “The Shining” (one of my favorite films of all time) and “Poltergeist.” I love creepy-but-not-scary, campy films like “Beetlejuice” and “Gremlins” and “Fright Night.”
I watch a lot of newer horror films, though they tend to scare me less and lack the nostalgic charm of the older films, so I don’t enjoy most of them as much as I do the classics. My favorite of the newer horror films deal not with gore or jump scares, but with psychological horror, which I find more frightening because it’s more realistic than monsters running around killing people.
The exception to that might be the first of the two new “It” films, a monster film I found wonderfully unsettling.
I’ve noticed scary movies became scarier to me after I married and had a son. With more to lose, the idea of some murderous thing in my house is far more frightening than if all that thing might find is me.
As we head into Halloween weekend and I crank up the horror films, I got to wondering: Why do we like being scared so much?
Fear science says we like getting spooked — at least when we know we’re actually safe, such as when we’re watching a movie in the comfort of our homes — for a variety of reasons.
First, our bodies produce all kinds of enjoyable chemicals when we experience fear.
According to a 2018 post from Psychology Today, our bodies produce adrenaline when we’re scared, preparing us to fight or flee the situation. With that adrenaline comes the pleasure chemicals endorphins and dopamine, which flood our brains and stick around even after the fear subsides, leaving a euphoric sensation once our brains and bodies realize we’re safe.
A psychologist writing on the Today show’s website in 2019 said that adrenaline rush can also make us feel stronger and more emotionally intuitive.
That’s the physical.
Psychologically, we feel better about ourselves for making it through the fear, according to the Psychology Today post.
The Today show post says we also experience catharsis by vicariously peeking in on the darker sides of the human experience, by seeing and hearing things so far removed from our day-to-day lives and releasing emotions we don’t normally get to release.
How often do we scream except at scary movies?
In a 2018 post, the University of Southern California says we can even become addicted to fear, in the same vein as adrenaline junkies who engage in dangerous activities like skydiving and bungie jumping.
The USC post also quoted an anthropologist who said scary stories can impart life lessons, the way classic fairy tales used fearful elements like the Big, Bad Wolf to teach children. Modern scary stories can warn us away from our own worst aspects.
“The monsters are us, in a sense,” the anthropologist told the USC writer. “They are that very dangerous part of us. And it’s good to recognize and be afraid of those evil parts of yourself.”
So, there you have it.
A good number of us like being scared because it produces pleasure-inducing chemicals in our brains, because it makes us feel better about ourselves knowing we’ve survived being afraid, because we’re all a little voyeuristic and like seeing things happen that don’t normally happen to us, and because it warns us against giving too much leeway to the worst parts of our psyches.
Plus, they’re just plain fun.
So, come Halloween on Monday, after I’m done handing out candy to all the little ghouls and goblins who come knocking, I’ll probably crank up “The Shining” again and take a lot of pleasure in watching Jack Nicholson go crazy with an axe.
Justin A. Hinkley can be reached at 989-354-3112 or jhinkley@thealpenanews.com. Follow him on Twitter @JustinHinkley.
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